When I was ready to work on the hat, my set of supplies looked like this. I had the gourd, with cork, a piece of chamois cloth and a piece of cotton cloth for the scarf, some natural and some died hemp twine, and some heavy duty scissors.

I tied the bit of cotton on first. I chose that piece especially and kept the face facing out. =)

The knot twine holding the cotton onto the neck is gathered inside the groove I filed into it earlier. Then I folded up the edges and tied them yet again to give the chamois “scarf” some sort of purchase to hold onto. Finally, the chamois scarf was tied overall with yellow hemp twine.

I've often mentioned in these projects tying and anchor knot in the twine to hold the feathers. I remembered to take a good photo of that so you would see what I mean when I say to make this anchor knot using a simple half hitch

I got a bunch of pretty neck hackles from my handy dandy rooster skin. No voodoo rattle maker should be without a handy dandy rooster skin. If you know why you need one, trust me, you need one.

I made a bunch of feathers with their pointy end all lined up so I could tie the whole bunch on at once. Using hemostats, I held the bunch to the yellow hemp twine above the half hitch. I ran a series of loops around it, each one poked through the loop to make another half hitch tie off. I ran these tie off knots on both sides of the half hitch in the yellow twine.


With the hat/scarf on the lady's head and the two feather bunches tied on, the rattle was finished and ready for a better photo than the preview pics.



The Leopard Gourd Rattle is ready for its next work in the tomahawk project.

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